Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time (A), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, October 7, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twenty-Seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time, A, Vigil
October 7, 2023

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, when Jesus will give us another parable about a vineyard, this time one that is leased out to tenants who, rather than paying their rent, beat and kill the servants sent to collect it and even kill the owner’s son when he comes to speak to them. What Jesus says has both a very important historical meaning as well as a crucial actual meaning. For us to understand its present significance, though, we first need to grasp the historical lessons Jesus was teaching his original listeners.
• With the image of the vineyard, Jesus was summarizing God’s relations with the Jewish people. As God himself said through the prophet Isaiah in this Sunday’s first reading: “The vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting.” The vineyard is ultimately all of God’s people, all of the children he has created. And we are meant to work and cultivate that vineyard.
• But God gave the house of Israel more than just this stewardship over the great natural endowment of creation, as he had given to other nations. He also made them stewards of a greater gift, the Covenant he had established with the human race.  Through Isaiah, we see how much personal care God took in preparing the vineyard of Israel. He “dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines; he built a watchtower in the midst of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it.” God himself, in other words, had done all of the hard work building the “infrastructure” of the vineyard, clearing it so that it could bear fruit, putting a watchtower in it to guard for animals coming to eat the fruit, establishing a wine press so that the fruit could immediately produce joy. He gave the “house of Israel” the relatively light task of maintaining that vineyard and bearing fruit from that Covenant. But what happened? God tells us through Isaiah that “he expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.” It had the appearance of growth, the outward show of fruit, but the fruit was worth nothing. “Fruit” is always to be interpreted as acts of love, justice, goodness, and faith. This is not what God found. He found, rather, bloodshed. So the owner of the vineyard — God the Father, as Jesus tells us in Gospel parable — sent his servants the prophets to remind them of the need to produce good fruit from all God’s gifts and to teach them by word and example how to do so. But their reaction was to beat and kill the messengers. So God the Father sent others, “more than the first, and they treated them in the same way.” This is precisely what happened to God’s prophets; almost all of whom were killed. Jesus, in fact, would later lament over the holy city, Jerusalem, because it was the site of the execution of so many prophets: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!” (Mt 23:37).
• Jesus tells us that after all of those unjust deaths his Father the landowner sent his son to them, saying, “They will respect my son.” But rather than respond with gratitude to yet one more chance, they said to themselves, “This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance,” and Jesus says, “they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him.”  When Jesus said those words, he was telling them precisely what was occurring in their hearts at that moment and prophesying what would happen within a fortnight. That sentiment, “Come, let us kill him” reverberated throughout Pontius Pilate’s courtyard as they screeched, “Let him be crucified! Let him be crucified!” (Mt 27:22-23).
• What was essentially going on within their hearts was that they did not want to be stewards of the vineyard, but owners. They did not want to have a God over them; they wanted to be gods themselves. Like power-hungry princes who kill any other claimants to the throne, they killed anyone who tried to teach them otherwise. The great English writer C.S. Lewis once said that the devil always tries to get us to think we’re owners. He wants us to say, like a whining little baby on its most selfish days, “Mine!”: “It’s my life, it’s my work, it’s my money, it’s my family, it’s my future, it’s my Sunday — Mine! Mine! Mine!”
• The first Sunday of October is Respect Life Sunday, when we pray and recommit ourselves to living and proclaiming the Gospel of Life, and we can see how the devil has insinuated the lie CS Lewis describes into the hearts of all those who justify abortion and euthanasia. Pro-abortion leaders, for example, trumpet the diabolical idea, “It’s my body! It’s my choice!” But their child’s body is not their body. Not even our body is our body; we’re stewards, not owners. Once the devil, however, has gotten someone to start thinking he or she is an “owner” and not a steward, disastrous consequences follow, something we’ve seen happen more than 60 million times in our country since the legalization of abortion in 1973. We see the same diabolical seduction at work among those people who are pushing for euthanasia under various euphemisms like physician assisted suicide or medical assistance in dying. People say, “It’s my life. I’ll determine when it ends.” But it’s not their life. Once again, we’re stewards, not owners. It’s no surprise that once people start to think that we, rather than God, are the lord of the living and the dead, that other atrocities ensue, like involuntary euthanasia, which is nothing short of murder. In the Netherlands, for example, doctors have started to determine when life is worth living and have been taking upon themselves the decision whether to try to help the patient get better (which is their duty) or to put the patient to sleep like an animal. Many senior citizens who are sick don’t want to go to the hospital when they’re ill out of fear that their doctors will kill them without their permission. Similar fears have arisen in Canada, in states where euthanasia has been legalized, and in other countries where people respond to the obvious cries for help not by addressing the pain but eliminating the patient.
• Jesus tells his Jewish listeners at the end of today’s parable that the vineyard — the kingdom of God — “will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.” That’s what Jesus did in the founding his Church. He passed along the stewardship of creation and especially God’s covenant with the human race to the Church he had founded, which began with faithful Jews who heeded the Vineyard Owner’s servants and Son. Like with the vineyard of the house of Israel, however, God is calling us to bear fruit in acts of self-giving love, justice, generosity, and faith. He wants us to bear the fruit of the kingdom. God wants us today to ask ourselves what type of fruit have we been bearing from the gift of our life, from the gift of grace, from the gift of the Covenant and all the blessings with which God has endowed us. Have we been making a difference in advancing a culture of life? Have we saved a life yet, by helping a pregnant woman choose life, by adopting a child, or by compassionately caring for an elderly loved one so that he or she is not tempted toward suicide but able to entrust himself or herself to the Lord and bear the fruit of love in the midst of suffering?
• As the Synod on Synodality for a Synodal Church meets in the Vatican during the month of October, let us pray that it will renew the Church in communion, participation and mission. There are elements of the Church, like we’ve seen in Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland, who have tried to use synodal structures to produce “wild grapes” rather than the fruit of faith. Rather than accept Scripture and Tradition as faithful stewards, some think that they’re owners of the deposit of faith and can change it to support whatever they think the Church should advance, like making the Church a democracy, treating sexual sins as quasi-sacraments that deserve the Church’s blessing, trying to reject Jesus’ and the Church’s practice of the Sacrament of Holy Orders, the gift of priestly celibacy and more. We pray that the Synod, which means the journey together of the Church, will strengthen us all with gratitude to follow faithfully in Christ’s footsteps.
• As we mention the gift of Holy Orders by which Christ continues to serve and guide us through priests and deacons, I’d like to pray with me in gratitude. 25 years ago this Sunday, with 30 classmates from the North American College, I was ordained a transitional deacon by Cardinal Edmund Szoka at St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. There’s great meaning to the fact that every bishop and every priest is first a deacon, ordained to imitate Christ the Deacon, the Greek work for servant, who came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. Like St. Stephen, like St. Lawrence, like St. Francis of Assisi, deacons are meant to help the whole Church bear fruit in charity. I ask you to pray for my classmates and me that, now as priests, we will produce fruit that lasts into eternity.

• In summarizing all of salvation history, it’s no surprise that Jesus did so in the form of the image of a vineyard. He knew from all eternity that he would one day take the “fruit of the vine” and turn it into his own blood, which was the price of our salvation. In the raw material for the Eucharist, Jesus showed how he wanted to incorporate our efforts. He chose to use not grain and grapes, but bread and wine, which not only the “fruit of the earth” and “of the vine” but “the work of human hands.” It is to Mass that we bring our patient, hard work and where God prunes us. In the vineyard which is the world, the Father is the vine grower, Jesus is the vine, and we are the branches (Jn 15:1-7). If we remain in Him and He in us, then we will bear fruit in acts of love that will last forever. As we prepare to receive Him this Sunday, we thank the Father for sending us His Son confident that we will not only “respect” him but love and embrace him in the blessed fruit of every womb and every vulnerable person, and with Him, produce a harvest of life that will know no end!

The Gospel passage on which the homily was based was: 

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